I have two kids in college. Not surprisingly, our family has lots of conversations about money. There is only so much of it in the First National Bank of Claycomb, and we have to prioritize how it gets spent. In essence, my family is a lot like a business: we have to...

As an analyst, it’s always good to enhance your agile maturity by looking back and assessing what you’ve learned in your experience: the good and the bad. Recently, I was fortunate enough to take such a trip down memory lane, courtesy of my annual email...

I recently read an article from CIO.com “6 Tips to Identify Project Management Red Flags.” While reading, I couldn’t help but think of business analysis red flags in the same respect. So here’s my take on “6 Tips to Identify Business Analysis Red Flags” to...

As I am sure you know, the IIBA released BABOK v3 in April 2015. Though there were many changes (some minor and, some more profound), the change that I found and believe to have one of the greatest impacts on the BA community is the disappearance of Enterprise...

This blog was orignally published on our VP of Product Development, Kent McDonald’s, blog, Beyond Requirements. What It Is The Purpose Based Alignment Model, created by Niel Nickolaisen, is a method for aligning business decisions and process and feature designs...

In Part 1 of this blog series, I challenged you to become part of the 30% of teams that make successful process changes. I introduced the framework for process improvement, and identified two questions that teams in the 30% consistently ask: Why are we doing this? Is...

I like to focus on the positive. I’m the person who skips right over the headlines about attacks and shootings to get to the stories that make me feel good. I figured out a few years ago that if something was really important and world altering, somebody in my family...

Henrik Kniberg in his excellent YouTube Video Agile Product Ownership points out that teams face three competing forces: Build the Right thing Build the thing Right Build the thing Fast (i.e. shorten the feedback cycle) All three are equally important, and they all...

One of my favorite aspects of adopting an agile mindset is the tendency to think about whether what I am doing actually adds value to the organization. With this though, comes the knotty problem that value can often be hard to clearly define. Because I generally...